Sapphire Energy, a producer of the world’s first renewable crude oil, fully repaid its $54.5 million loan guarantee early. The loan was awarded to Sapphire Energy by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2009 through the Biorefinery Assistance Program.

“Sapphire Energy is very grateful to the USDA for supporting algae crude oil as an alternative source of energy as well as our vision to make this industry a reality,” said Cynthia ‘CJ’ Warner, CEO and chairman of Sapphire Energy. “With their backing, we did exactly what we set out to do. We grew our company, advanced our algae technologies, and built, on time and on budget, the first, fully operational, commercial demonstration, algae-to-energy facility that delivers a proven process for producing refinery-ready Green Crude oil. We could not have built this first of a kind facility without the support of the USDA. Moving forward, our focus is on commercializing our technology and expanding operations to bring crude oil production to commercial demonstration scale as planned.”

Sapphire Energy is now working on scaling up its production of the world's first renewable crude oil. The company built its Green Crude Farm, which promotes algae crude oil production from cultivation to extraction. Its biofuel is made from photosynthetic microorganisms like algae and cyanobacteria, and uses sunlight and carbon dioxide as their feedstock. Also, its biofuel is not dependent on food crops or farmland, does not use potable water, does not result in biodiesel or ethanol, and is low carbon, renewable and scalable.

The farm has created over 600 jobs throughout its phase 1 construction with about 30 full-time employees currently operating the facility.

Sapphire Energy plans to produce 100 barrels of crude oil per day in 2015, and hit commercial-scale production in 2018.

This isn't the first government loan to be paid off early this year. Back in May, Tesla Motors repaid its $465 million loan to the U.S. Department of Energy nine years early.

I don't see the problem, if they pay it back no one has lost anything. Investing in energy independence just makes economic sense as compared to continuing to rely on foreign oil suppliers.

I don't agree with all subsidies, corn ethanol doesn't make any sense because they burn nearly as much gasoline to produce the ethanol as they get out of the process and the net environmental impact is much worse than oil.

But loans for research and development of promising ideas makes perfect sense.

With that frame of thought, then no government should be in the business of funding research, even for things it needs like new airplane designs, tanks, destroyers, aircraft carriers, radar, sonar, missiles, etc. If the private industry hasn't made it and isn't selling it, then the government shouldn't be buying it, because the act of inventing something would require lending the money to research the new technology and scientific knowledge to make the item. And lets be realistic here, no private industry would ever risk building an aircraft carrier without having a buyer before making it, and no buyer would purchase something without knowing it works, which means the company would need to foot the bill for researching if their design works, and for something like an aircraft carrier, it would cost billions to prove out the design, and no company would risk billions of capital on something they do not even know there will be a buyer, since the government could simply say, we don't need a new one for another 20 years, at which point the company that spent the capital for the design would be certainly out of business having tossed billions down the hole.

It is the duty of the government to provide a well equipped military, as stated on the constitution. The pay up front for both the design and manufacture of said aircraft carrier.

It isn't the duty of the government to act as a lending bank. I can see the point of government approved loans for research like this, but it shouldn't be tax dollars paying for it. Private banks should decide whether or not to loan out such large sums based on government approval, credit rating and the choice of said bank.